You and I are not the average PC purchaser - who never opens the machine for three to six years, and then replaces it. For them, the PC *is* just a toaster with more buttons. So long as it works until they feel a need to replace it.
There were a number of manufacturers experimenting with injection-moulded ABS cases quite a few years ago - they typically needed no tools (or at most a screwdriver for a single screw) to open and service, and could easily be broken down for recycling into a pile of electronics, a stack of plastic and a small amount of sheetmetal. It's quite possible that heavy-duty corrugated cardboard covered with a thin polycarbonate shell and lined with a foil or thin sheetmetal shield woud be able to do just as well for three-year-throw-away consumer-grade computers like most people are using.
It's also quite hard to see that kind of case taking off for that kind of use, as in five years I expect a three-year-throw-away computer to be about the same size as a hardcover book and easily attach to modular external storage - like what the Mac Mini tries to be. Of course, I've been expecting *that* real-soon-now since I first heard about USB, and I'm still waiting for my jetpack and flying car...
Some species of Terror Bird would chase down their prey and literally peck it to death. They had an interesting feature about these things on Discovery last night; with this story it just seemed appropriate to mention it.
Polly wants a cracker. NOW. And a couple of llamas. And a six pack of assorted primates, starting with you.
It's so much harder to plug an ethernet cable into your neighbour's router without them noticing.
A lot of access points used to support what's called a station mode; i.e. you can plug a wired device into them, and they'll take care of that pesky wireless connection to the neighbour's open access point. It was intended as a way to allow wired devices to participate in wireless networks e.g. ethernet printservers, game consoles etc.
I know my crappy old Minitar mnwapb does this, and 11b from something in my roof would be LOTS better than a *really* flakey 11g connection from something on my kitchen table. Not that I'd do that sort of thing, of course...
Uranium is a finite resource too, much more finite than fossil fuels in fact. If the world suddenly switched massively to nuclear power, there would be about a decade worth of uranium to extract. See this page
Not quite. That's assuming a "once-through" fuel cycle, and ignoring things like the newer generations of breeder reactors that burn waste from other reactors. Depending on a number of factors, estimates range between 80 and five BILLION year.
I quite like Bernard Cohen's take on things, cited in that same article, that effectively suggests that we can keep getting uranium from seawater at least as long as the time we have until the sun burns out. I don't quite know how realistic it is, but it's certainly interesting and worthy of further examination.
(still the apotheosis of 2-d fighting; just try finding a copy on ebay)
*ahem* You don't necessarily need to go looking for ways to buy the disc if all you want to do is play the game... it's a Dreamcast. after all. If you're a collector, then get then by all means get the original.
One might feel a few qualms about looking for illegal copies of current software for current consoles on line, but I find it a bit hard to raise the "Think of the Corporations and the starving game developers" argument for an out-of-print title for an out-of-production console with a straight face.
...there's a chance that health insurers may require a certain minimum BMI in order to ensure you have enough raw materials available for the kind of interventions they're likely to need to fund, or else your premiums will skyrocket to cover the lengthier and more-expensive tissue culture techniques and the extended time on life support needed while your doctors repair your heart or grow you a new liver?
I'll take three triple cheeseburgers, a 40-pack of McNuggets and two "pounders", thanks.
It it's facial recognition, the system could be tuned to deal with that. I'm no expert on the subject, but it seems to me that most forms of dwarfism have quite distinctive facial structure markers. Look for people with short stature and those facial characteristics and you're set to display targetted advertising for a mechanic who specialises in car control conversions or a cabinet maker who specialises in pneumatically or hydraulically raisable kitchen flooring or counters/cabinets (is there such a thing? Seems obvious to me, safer than stools or stepladders, a great idea where you've got people of mixed stature in one household, lets you keep counter heights at the levels mandated by building codes etc).
Worst case, they get ads for Nerf guns. Big deal, you can never have too many Nerf guns.
I don't know about the poison part, and he's definitely not villainous, but you've just reminded me of what Brain from the Laundry books by Charles Stross had to do to keep his security clearance.
My hearing must be better than I thought... I'm 40 and although I can't necessarily consciously pick up that I'm hearing a 17kHz tone, it sure as hell annoys me.
15625 Hz is *definitely* still within my hearing and annoyance range...
Twenty or twenty-five years ago I noticed that those little buggers made different noises when startled than when taking off normally. I thought that was something that everybody who knew the birds knew about. Guess I should have gone into biology, and taken a little more notice of what was quite literally in my own back yard when I was growing up.
Seriously, though, from what I've read on the subject, they were pretty happy to just get packets flowing. There's a quite readable section on the connection of the first two IMPs in M. Mitchell Waldrop's book on J.C.R.Licklider, but there are probably entire books on the subject out there somewhere.
Mind you, it's being used by 419ers... they don't honestly believe that they'll keep 419ers out with a captcha, do they? These are the same people who'll cheerfully sit there sending mail out through hotmail accounts, so a captcha's not going to keep them out.
Just to throw a little petrol on the bonfire, they're spammers too - or, at least, some of their followers are. I've been playing wack-a-mole with them at work for at least the last three years. Over that time they've been spamming addresses harvested from our internal staff directory (probably harvested by sympathisers on staff), inlcuding departmental contact addresses and roles like postmaster, and pissing off a reasonable number of my users in the process. They've used at least three different ADSL and wireless providers in that time - nastygrams to the providers' abuse addresses went unanswered. Forged sender addresses were the norm, mostly at free providers, although more recently falunhr.org managed to get blocked here because they were spamming the same recipient list from addresses in that domain and including links to that domain through what appeared to be bots. (and yes, I seriously considered whether it was likely to be a joe-job by the Chinese Government - since they were sending to *exactly* the same recipients they'd used for their other mailouts, I don't believe it was)
Seriously.... they claimed all this same stuff for vista. and we all found out they were full of crap.
I guess it depends on what else, apart from the OS, the machine's running in the background and how nicely that stuff plays with others. Microsoft's marketing department isn't alone in being full of crap - sometimes their customers machines are too.
That is actually just an UI bug in the door. If you want people to push a door, you should use a handle that is like a plate, where you can easily put your hand against and push it. If you want people to pull the door open, you need to use vertical rod as a handle, where people can easily grab on to pull it. With this very small change, you don't even need to push/pull texts on the doors.
Not necessarily a bug...it's a feature that the user doesn't know how to use properly, much like the much maligned "Any" key. If you're inside an outward-opening door that has a pull handle on the inside rather than a plate, you can pull on it to stop others getting in. If there's a double-set of such doors, you could slide a pair of skis or a cricket bat or some other object through them so you won't need to stand there holding them shut to stop people getting in. Whether the door is on your side of its jamb or the other, or the positioning of other hardware like automatic closers, gives the user sufficient cues to indicate the opening direction. You also get reduced building complexity by being able to re-use a single kind of handle instead of having to have two differernt ones. Don't blame the implementation for the fact that the user isn't up to understanding the advanced options or the context in which the function is being used.
Interesting. With the exception of a few titles optimised for PAL, or the Rareware stuff that was largely designed to run at the same speed on either version, I thought the N64 PAL versions were slower too. I seem to recall there being a bit of griping about Mario Kart being about 20% slower on a PAL N64 than an NTSC one, and had thought that applied to most of Nintendo's own and most of the third-party stuff too. But that's just hearsay; I have no NTSC N64 carts, and no NTSC GameCube discs (got a Datel Freeloader, but never got around to buying any foreign discs).
Which games, and which consoles? My experience - at least with 8-bit Nintendo, for which I have a good selection of cartridges and for which there are some decent emulators and ready access to NTSC rom images - has been the opposite, and that the PAL versions are easier because of the extra time from the slightly slower clock.
Sometimes, a disk can be spun up normally after a few years; other times, the spindle motor will stall trying to unstick the heads. There's various methods to relieve this striction, such as freezing, baking, or spinning the drive by hand on a tabletop and letting momentum free the heads, but they're all ugly.
For some old Seagate 5.25" MFM drives, a good rap on the side of the drive with a screwdriver handle worked nicely. I had a half-height 20 meg drive about 15 years ago that I had to do that to from time to time.
The moon is closer, but it's also likely to be a more hostile environment - for the equipment, and possibly the crew too. Moon dust is *really* nasty stuff.
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You and I are not the average PC purchaser - who never opens the machine for three to six years, and then replaces it. For them, the PC *is* just a toaster with more buttons. So long as it works until they feel a need to replace it.
There were a number of manufacturers experimenting with injection-moulded ABS cases quite a few years ago - they typically needed no tools (or at most a screwdriver for a single screw) to open and service, and could easily be broken down for recycling into a pile of electronics, a stack of plastic and a small amount of sheetmetal. It's quite possible that heavy-duty corrugated cardboard covered with a thin polycarbonate shell and lined with a foil or thin sheetmetal shield woud be able to do just as well for three-year-throw-away consumer-grade computers like most people are using.
It's also quite hard to see that kind of case taking off for that kind of use, as in five years I expect a three-year-throw-away computer to be about the same size as a hardcover book and easily attach to modular external storage - like what the Mac Mini tries to be. Of course, I've been expecting *that* real-soon-now since I first heard about USB, and I'm still waiting for my jetpack and flying car...
Some species of Terror Bird would chase down their prey and literally peck it to death. They had an interesting feature about these things on Discovery last night; with this story it just seemed appropriate to mention it.
Polly wants a cracker. NOW. And a couple of llamas. And a six pack of assorted primates, starting with you.
It's so much harder to plug an ethernet cable into your neighbour's router without them noticing.
A lot of access points used to support what's called a station mode; i.e. you can plug a wired device into them, and they'll take care of that pesky wireless connection to the neighbour's open access point. It was intended as a way to allow wired devices to participate in wireless networks e.g. ethernet printservers, game consoles etc.
I know my crappy old Minitar mnwapb does this, and 11b from something in my roof would be LOTS better than a *really* flakey 11g connection from something on my kitchen table. Not that I'd do that sort of thing, of course...
Uranium is a finite resource too, much more finite than fossil fuels in fact. If the world suddenly switched massively to nuclear power, there would be about a decade worth of uranium to extract. See this page
Not quite. That's assuming a "once-through" fuel cycle, and ignoring things like the newer generations of breeder reactors that burn waste from other reactors. Depending on a number of factors, estimates range between 80 and five BILLION year.
I quite like Bernard Cohen's take on things, cited in that same article, that effectively suggests that we can keep getting uranium from seawater at least as long as the time we have until the sun burns out. I don't quite know how realistic it is, but it's certainly interesting and worthy of further examination.
*ahem* You don't necessarily need to go looking for ways to buy the disc if all you want to do is play the game... it's a Dreamcast. after all. If you're a collector, then get then by all means get the original.
One might feel a few qualms about looking for illegal copies of current software for current consoles on line, but I find it a bit hard to raise the "Think of the Corporations and the starving game developers" argument for an out-of-print title for an out-of-production console with a straight face.
...there's a chance that health insurers may require a certain minimum BMI in order to ensure you have enough raw materials available for the kind of interventions they're likely to need to fund, or else your premiums will skyrocket to cover the lengthier and more-expensive tissue culture techniques and the extended time on life support needed while your doctors repair your heart or grow you a new liver?
I'll take three triple cheeseburgers, a 40-pack of McNuggets and two "pounders", thanks.
Why not use colour e-ink displays? Surely they've got the kinks ironed out by now...
It it's facial recognition, the system could be tuned to deal with that. I'm no expert on the subject, but it seems to me that most forms of dwarfism have quite distinctive facial structure markers. Look for people with short stature and those facial characteristics and you're set to display targetted advertising for a mechanic who specialises in car control conversions or a cabinet maker who specialises in pneumatically or hydraulically raisable kitchen flooring or counters/cabinets (is there such a thing? Seems obvious to me, safer than stools or stepladders, a great idea where you've got people of mixed stature in one household, lets you keep counter heights at the levels mandated by building codes etc).
Worst case, they get ads for Nerf guns. Big deal, you can never have too many Nerf guns.
I don't know about the poison part, and he's definitely not villainous, but you've just reminded me of what Brain from the Laundry books by Charles Stross had to do to keep his security clearance.
It's just like that teenager-deterrent noise: http://www.noloitering.ca/tone.html which was ironically, but hilarously turned against adults: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5434687
My hearing must be better than I thought... I'm 40 and although I can't necessarily consciously pick up that I'm hearing a 17kHz tone, it sure as hell annoys me.
15625 Hz is *definitely* still within my hearing and annoyance range...
Twenty or twenty-five years ago I noticed that those little buggers made different noises when startled than when taking off normally. I thought that was something that everybody who knew the birds knew about. Guess I should have gone into biology, and taken a little more notice of what was quite literally in my own back yard when I was growing up.
the first spam e-mail was sent.
No, that was about nine years later.
Seriously, though, from what I've read on the subject, they were pretty happy to just get packets flowing. There's a quite readable section on the connection of the first two IMPs in M. Mitchell Waldrop's book on J.C.R.Licklider, but there are probably entire books on the subject out there somewhere.
Mind you, it's being used by 419ers... they don't honestly believe that they'll keep 419ers out with a captcha, do they? These are the same people who'll cheerfully sit there sending mail out through hotmail accounts, so a captcha's not going to keep them out.
Just to throw a little petrol on the bonfire, they're spammers too - or, at least, some of their followers are. I've been playing wack-a-mole with them at work for at least the last three years. Over that time they've been spamming addresses harvested from our internal staff directory (probably harvested by sympathisers on staff), inlcuding departmental contact addresses and roles like postmaster, and pissing off a reasonable number of my users in the process. They've used at least three different ADSL and wireless providers in that time - nastygrams to the providers' abuse addresses went unanswered. Forged sender addresses were the norm, mostly at free providers, although more recently falunhr.org managed to get blocked here because they were spamming the same recipient list from addresses in that domain and including links to that domain through what appeared to be bots. (and yes, I seriously considered whether it was likely to be a joe-job by the Chinese Government - since they were sending to *exactly* the same recipients they'd used for their other mailouts, I don't believe it was)
So no, they don't get a lot of sympathy from me.
...until you plug it in, at which point you'd better pray you've got adequate cooling.
phone spam is getting to the point where we need blacklists and whitelists.
Like this?
Pull the plug!
Seriously.... they claimed all this same stuff for vista. and we all found out they were full of crap.
I guess it depends on what else, apart from the OS, the machine's running in the background and how nicely that stuff plays with others. Microsoft's marketing department isn't alone in being full of crap - sometimes their customers machines are too.
They can start with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
That is actually just an UI bug in the door. If you want people to push a door, you should use a handle that is like a plate, where you can easily put your hand against and push it. If you want people to pull the door open, you need to use vertical rod as a handle, where people can easily grab on to pull it. With this very small change, you don't even need to push/pull texts on the doors.
Not necessarily a bug...it's a feature that the user doesn't know how to use properly, much like the much maligned "Any" key. If you're inside an outward-opening door that has a pull handle on the inside rather than a plate, you can pull on it to stop others getting in. If there's a double-set of such doors, you could slide a pair of skis or a cricket bat or some other object through them so you won't need to stand there holding them shut to stop people getting in. Whether the door is on your side of its jamb or the other, or the positioning of other hardware like automatic closers, gives the user sufficient cues to indicate the opening direction. You also get reduced building complexity by being able to re-use a single kind of handle instead of having to have two differernt ones. Don't blame the implementation for the fact that the user isn't up to understanding the advanced options or the context in which the function is being used.
Interesting. With the exception of a few titles optimised for PAL, or the Rareware stuff that was largely designed to run at the same speed on either version, I thought the N64 PAL versions were slower too. I seem to recall there being a bit of griping about Mario Kart being about 20% slower on a PAL N64 than an NTSC one, and had thought that applied to most of Nintendo's own and most of the third-party stuff too. But that's just hearsay; I have no NTSC N64 carts, and no NTSC GameCube discs (got a Datel Freeloader, but never got around to buying any foreign discs).
Which games, and which consoles? My experience - at least with 8-bit Nintendo, for which I have a good selection of cartridges and for which there are some decent emulators and ready access to NTSC rom images - has been the opposite, and that the PAL versions are easier because of the extra time from the slightly slower clock.
Sometimes, a disk can be spun up normally after a few years; other times, the spindle motor will stall trying to unstick the heads. There's various methods to relieve this striction, such as freezing, baking, or spinning the drive by hand on a tabletop and letting momentum free the heads, but they're all ugly.
For some old Seagate 5.25" MFM drives, a good rap on the side of the drive with a screwdriver handle worked nicely. I had a half-height 20 meg drive about 15 years ago that I had to do that to from time to time.
Better yet have them build an E-Meter
I've got modpoints, and I thought your E-Meter class project suggestion has merit, but I couldn't find the "+1 Fair Game" moderation option.
The moon is closer, but it's also likely to be a more hostile environment - for the equipment, and possibly the crew too. Moon dust is *really* nasty stuff.
or an alternative barrier product is invented.
Llamas. You don't pay extra for fur or ridges.
(apologies to the rest of the slashdot community for this old in-joke)